Introduction This report will compare two experiments; Asch 's conformity experiment and Milgram 's obedience experiment. The two experiments will be compared for validity and their ethics. In addition, this report will take into consideration Zimbardo 's Stanford Prison experiment and the Lucifer Effect. To analyse how obedience and conformity theories can be used as an example of why good people can turn bad. This report will also look at how obedience and conformity can be applied to the criminal
research into obedience Obedience is a compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority (Oxforddictionaries, n.d). Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, known for his experiment on obedience. This was taken place in the 1960’s while he was completing his professorship at Yale University (wikipedia.org, 2015). Milgram’s (1963) study of obedience was a laboratory study to investigate how far people will go in obeying authority. The experiment took place
The Milgram study was considered to be one of the most famous studies, on obedience in the history of psychology. The Milgram study was done by Stanley Milgram a Yale University psychologist, whose study was to focus on two things one being obedience to authority, and a persons personal conscience. The results of the study were remarkable, as according to (McLeod, 2007) 65 percent of two-thirds of the participants or teachers continued administering shocks to the highest voltage level of 450 volts
Psychological Processes that May Be Involved in Obedience to Authority Obedience is the following of someone else's instructions or orders to do something. The instructions are usually from someone who has authority such as a parent or teacher. Milgram proposed the agentic state theory; this is where we act as an agent of someone who has authority, it means that we find it easy to deny personal responsibility for our actions because we have just been following orders
What can social psychology teach us about what happened at Abu Ghraib? By Mandy Stead During the Iraq war that between 2003 and 2006, the united states army committed a series of human rights violations against prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Bagdad. The violations included murder, sexual and physical abuse, rape, torturer, sodomy, humiliating and dehumanizing prisoners. In 2004 the abuse that was carried out was exposed by the publication of images that were taken by the soldiers that carried
A critical review of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and the BBC Prison Study Introduction Tyranny is defined: an unequal social system involving the arbitrary or oppressive use of power by one group over another (Reicher & Haslam, 2006). The link made between groups and tyranny has a long history in social psychology being prominent nearly 2,400 years ago with the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle believed that collective rule leads to moral irresponsibility, haphazardness and is
His theories were tested in his famous line test experiments, where a participant, placed last in a row of other “participants” (actors) were to choose the correct corresponding line for a set of lines. However, all the actors were instructed to answer incorrectly, leading the participants
Identify and describe social psychological explanations for the emergence of public disorder. Public disorder can be defined as any behavioural act in the public eye that goes against societal norms. This may be an act of an individual or from members of a larger group. Gustave le Bon (1895) categorises a group or “crowd” as those possessing characteristics including “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the
I value shared knowledge for it has contributed to my own understanding of the world. Most of the things "I know"-personal knowledge- are my individual interpretation of what "we know"-shared knowledge. There is a strong link between shared knowledge and personal knowledge but the extent to which shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge differs across disciplines. This essay explores the areas of knowledge of the Humanities and the Arts, demonstrates that shared knowledge influences personal knowledge
Philip G. Zimbardo’s theories and experiments have made him stand out, and differentiate himself from the rest in his profession. Zimbardo 's area of expertise in the field of psychology is social psychology, the branch that deals with social interactions, including their origins and their effects on the individual. Zimbardo may be most well known for his Stanford Prison experiment, an experiment that seems to address the definition of social psychology perfectly. In this experiment Zimbardo had clinically